writing and faith

I’ve been thinking about words lately, mostly because it seems I have fewer these days. Back when I first began blogging eight years ago, I posted every day, seven days a week. Over time that frequency diminished to five days a week, then three days, until, most recently, I settled on once a week. Some weeks, even one post feels like a stretch.

I’m not sure why I seem to have less and less to say. Maybe after eight years of blogging, 1,547 posts, 86 columns for the Journal Star, three books, and dozens of articles, I’ve simply burned out.

Or maybe I’ve said all I have to say.

Or maybe, in a world that feels noisier every day, I’ve become more discerning about what and how much I add to the cacophony of voices and opinions.

I’ve been reading Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart. It’s a small book, but it’s packed with powerful insights. Nouwen has (ironically) a lot to say about the value of silence:

“Let us at least raise the question of whether our lavish ways of sharing are not more compulsive than virtuous; that instead of creating community they tend to flatten out our life together.”

Nouwen wrote those words long before the advent of blogging and social media, but I can’t help but read them through the lens of the present day and from my own experience as an author.

When I posted that quote on Instagram (again, the irony), a reader commented that she didn’t understand the last bit, the part about how shared words can flatten out our life together.

I’m not sure I totally understand what he means either, but I know from my own experience, I often come away from social media feeling flattened — numb, distant, distracted, fragmented — whether I’ve shared myself or read what others have shared. To me, there is a false intimacy and a one-dimensionality there, even as we strive for authenticity, depth, and connection.

Nouwen also writes about the importance of faithfully caring for the inward fire.

“It is not so strange that many ministers have become burnt-out cases, people who say many words and share many experiences, but in whom the fire of God’s Spirit has died and from whom not much more comes forth than their own boring, petty ideas and feelings.

Our first and foremost task is faithfully to care for the inward fire so that when it is really needed it can offer the warmth and light to lost travelers.”

On one hand, caring for the inward fire as my first and foremost task feels selfish to me. As a “Christian writer,” I feel compelled to use my gifts to share the gospel — to offer, to the best of my ability, a little light by which to see along the journey. Caring for my own inward fire — especially caring for it first and foremost — doesn’t feel self-sacrificial enough.

Yet here’s the clincher: that inward light is what feeds my words. If I allow my own inner light to be diminished or extinguished, my words will become a mere clanging cymbal — noisy and persistent, but empty of truth.

The inward light also feeds me. Without it, I am an empty shell without a pearl; a body without a spirit.

“As ministers, our greatest temptation is toward too many words,” Nouwen writes. “They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit.”

I think I’ve mostly reversed the order here by trying to care for the inward fire of others before my own. And isn’t that, in some ways, irreverent or perhaps even blasphemous – to assume the soul-care of others is my job, rather than God’s?

I guess this is a long-winded way (again, the irony!) of saying I’ll be quiet in this space for a while – perhaps for the rest of the summer, perhaps longer. I’ve resisted this decision. For a variety of reasons I’ve tried to ignore the nudge. To stop blogging seems both unwise professionally and a little bit unfair to my readers, some of whom have been faithfully walking alongside me here the whole long way (bless you!).

Yet I also know it would be more unwise to keep pushing. I don’t want to become the person who says many words and shares many experiences, but in whom the fire of God’s spirit has died.

Thanks for your understanding and patience, friends. You are very dear to me, and I am more grateful to you than you will probably ever know.

I did a hard, brave thing last week. I emailed an acquaintance — a successful, well-respected author whom I’ve never met in person but know casually from online interactions — and I asked if she might be willing to “broker an introduction” between me and another successful, well-known author whom I don’t know at all and who doesn’t know me from Eve. I am hoping (read: beg-praying, wringing hands, Lamazing) that this person might be willing to read my Luther and Katharina manuscript, and, if he approves of it, might consider writing a foreword for it.

Yes, writing this email with this request to an acquiantance I admire and respect but don’t really know felt exactly as awkward and uncomfortable as it sounds.

It was little consolation that this kind of request is not unusual. In the business world it’s called networking, but here’s the thing: networking takes place not just at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, but in Christian publishing circles, too (though I’m guessing with fewer Hugo Boss suits and, I’m assuming, a more generous helping of ethics).

I do not like this part of my job. ANP (Awkward Networking Phobia) is partly why I am a writer in the first place. This is why I have chosen a job that largely consists of sitting alone in my house at my desk overlooking the finch feeder swaying from the river birch tree. This is why I am not an investment banker or a financial advisor (besides that fact that I very nearly flunked Calculus my freshman year in college, because of course it makes perfect sense that an ENGLISH major would take Calculus, right?). Nevertheless, networking — or if you prefer a more Christiany word, “connecting” — is indeed part of my job from time to time, which means on some days, I have to take a deep breath, place my fingers on the keyboard, and make the hard, brave ask.

And so I did. I wrote the awkward email to my acquaintance. And she in turn graciously made the request of her author friend. And now we wait for his response.

“It seems that so much depends on listening to the quietest whispers…And so much depends on following, even if we drag all our fears and doubts along for the wild ride,” writes Christie Purifoy in Roots and Sky. “I don’t think following Christ is like aiming at a tiny bull’s-eye on a diminishing target. We are not in constant danger of missing the one right road God has mapped out for us.”

I know it might seem like a stretch to say that writing an awkward networking email is somehow part of “following Christ.” But strangely, I do see the connection. Writing this book has been an act of obedience to God; seeing it all the way through from start to finish to the best of my ability is an act of obedience, too.

It’s highly unlikely this author will say “yes” to my request, and despite my hand wringing and Lamazing, I understand that his “yes” or “no” is not really the big-picture point. As my editor assured me after I’d sent him a hyperventilating email, there’s always a Plan B.

The point is that I did the hard thing. I was brave. I stepped into a vulnerable place, and I dragged all my fears and doubts along for the wild ride. I risked being rejected. I risked feeling small. I leapt into the unknown, the land of no guarantees.

I am doing the work, regardless of the outcome. And I am trusting that no matter what happens, no matter what the author’s answer is, there is more than one right road unfurling ahead of me.

I’ve been praying a new prayer lately. It goes like this: “God, help me be small. Help me embrace the small. Help me love and live the small. Amen.”

This is a big deal for me, because I am not ordinarily an embracer of the small. My prayers to God over the last 18 months have sounded more like this: “God, please help my book do better. Help me be more successful. Help me achieve my dreams of becoming a successful writer.”

See the trend there? Bigger, better, more. That’s who I’ve been my whole life: the achiever. The striver. The hard worker. Ambitious. Driven. Type A Times Ten. I knew that long before my StrenthsFinder results identified Discipline, Responsibility, Achiever and Focus as my top strengths. That’s who I am. I’m made that way.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those qualities. They are strengths indeed. In fact, those qualities are quite useful; my go-get-ed-ness has helped me in more ways than I can count.

But my strengths have also hurt me because I have let them define me and dictate my life. I have let these particular strengths overshadow the whole person God has made me to be.

You might recall a post I wrote several months ago about a defining moment I experienced with God – a moment in which I heard him say, in so many unspoken words, “Trust me.” And then there was this more recent post, a simple word picture that I published a couple of months ago, inspired by this verse from Isaiah: “Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved.”

I’ve been repeating those two phrases to myself for months now – trust me; return to me and rest in me. I knew somehow that God intended those two messages to go hand-in-hand, but I couldn’t quite figure out what he meant by them.

For a long time I thought God was trying to tell me something about my calling as a writer and my struggles with book publishing. I thought he might be saying something like, “Trust me with this, Michelle,” and “Rest in me, Michelle; I’ve got this.” I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I thought those words were God’s way of reassuring me: “Don’t worry, Michelle, I will make you a successful author in due time.”

Turns out, that’s what I wanted those words to mean. What God actually meant was something quite different.

God, it turns out, wants to save me from myself.

In the words of Emily Freeman, God has been trying to teach me how to live in the kingdom he has built for me, rather than in the kingdom I have been trying to build for myself.

I am finally listening.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition, drive, dreams and success. There’s nothing wrong with working hard toward a goal. God has work for each one of us to do, and he expectes we won’t slack off in doing it.

However he also expects us to hand over the outcomes of our work. He expects us to rest in him. He expects us to do our best at the work he has given us to do, and then hand the rest to him: the expectations, the fears, the hopes, the outcomes, and even the results of our work.

This is where I go wrong every single time. I do the work, because I’m a Hard Worker, but then I cling with a vice-grip to the outcomes. And when the outcomes don’t line up with my expectations, I cling all the harder.

This clinging wears me out. It’s exhausting and disheartening and just plain depressing. It’s the clinging to the outcomes, not the work itself, that makes me question my career and calling. It’s the clinging that makes me wonder if I’ve made a grave mistake, if maybe I shouldn’t be a writer after all.

When God said, “Trust me. Return to me and rest in me,” he was referring to something much, much bigger and much more important than publishing success and career success. He was talking about my relationship with him.

God is calling me to live here, right where I am, right where he has me for a reason. In the smallness. In the now. Regardless of outcomes. Regardless of results.

The truth is, I can’t be in right relationship with God while I am holding so tightly to something else. I can’t hold on to both God and outcomes. The outcomes have to go in order for me to live in a true and right relationship with God. He knows this.

It’s why he said, “Trust me.”

It’s why he said, “Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved.”

God wants to save me.

This post was inspired by Emily Freeman’s new book Simply Tuesday: Small-Moment Living in a Fast-MovingWorld. She didn’t ask me to write this post or talk about her book. I’m not on her launch team or anything like that. But I loved this book so much, I want to shout about it to the world. I read it through twice and took copious notes, and have been pondering and pondering her words and how God is speaking through her to me about my striving, bigger-better-more-more-more tendencies. Highly recommended, friends, especially if you happen to be a Type A Times Ten Strivey Striver like me.

Well hello there, friends…we’re all still standing after last week’s post, yes? Let me just say that I’m glad you are still here, truly.

In the aftermath of last week’s gay marriage post, a couple of people asked me why I felt the need to write on such a controversial topic. Their question wasn’t accusatory; they honestly wanted to know why I, a self-proclaimed controversy-phobe, would take on such a lightning rod issue. So here’s my answer to that question, in case you, too, were wondering.

For quite a long time now I’ve felt an increasing disconnect between how I present myself here and in other spaces online and who I am in “real life,” so to speak. And while I’ve never been intentionally dishonest here on the blog or on social media, I came to feel that some of my thoughts and beliefs, particularly those related to the LGBTQ community, had become something of an elephant in the room, like I was living the “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy. It felt disingenuous. Truthfully, I was beginning to feel a bit fractured – almost like I had an online identity and an in-person identity — and I was tired of keeping up appearances. I wanted to come clean here, to set the record straight.

It’s funny, back when I first began to claim my identity as a Christian, I hesitated to broadcast that to my “in real life” community, partially because I was afraid of being judged. The truth is, for non-religious people (which is not to say that my entire “real life” community is non-religious, but many of my friends and family are), the label “Christian” is not necessarily positive. As a person new to the faith, I was more comfortable claiming my Christian identity online, where I could talk about my faith with other Christians and not worry about being labeled in a particular way. At some point during the last couple of years, though, something shifted as I began to realize that I was less religiously conservative than many of my online Christian peers. At one point I even felt like I was “too Christian” for many of my in-person peers, and “not Christian enough” for my online community. That was fun.

Long story short, I reached a point in which I didn’t feel that I was being true to myself, and I didn’t feel like I was being true to you. And let’s be brutally honest about this: part of the reason I maintained this split identity for so long was because I didn’t want to lose readers. I know, it’s gross, but it’s the truth. I felt pressure — pressure to keep building my platform, pressure to grow an audience, pressure to present the best possible scenario of potential readers to my publishers. I’m not blaming the publishing industry entirely – my own ego certainly plays into this (i.e. more readers and more subscribers means I am more popular and more successful – yay, me!) — but the need to build a viable platform was definitely a factor.

The harsh reality was that last Thursday’s post about gay marriage was a huge risk for me. I lost 47 blog subscribers in two days, and that hurts – not only because my platform is still small and that loss is big (to put it in perspective, it would typically take around 6 or 7 months or longer to add 47 new subscribers to my email subscription list), but also because, well, it’s hurtful. I took the time to look at some of those readers who unsubscribed – I was curious if I knew any of them personally, or if they’d been long-time readers. And it hurt to know that in many cases, one post was enough to prompt longtime, loyal readers to unsubscribe. These were readers who had, up to this point, ostensibly found spiritual or other sustenance in my writing, in some cases for years, but were willing to or felt compelled to sacrifice that because of one point of disagreement (albeit a substantial point, but still). That was painful.

On a more positive note, however, I also feel relief. You know where I stand now, and even if we don’t agree on this particular issue, I don’t feel like I’m hiding anything important anymore. We can move forward in a more authentic, honest way. And as I said at the start of this blog post, I deeply appreciate those of you who have stuck around, particularly those of you who disagree with me. I really do believe that we can disagree, even on important issues, and still move forward in authentic relationship and in Christian faith, learn from one another and love one another.

So. For the record, I will not be making a habit of writing LGBTQ/Christian/same-sex marriage posts in the future. This is not my new “thing” – frankly, I don’t have the guts for it. I much prefer to delve into other deep issues, like the spiritual discipline of walking my dog.

I am heartened to know, though, that if I do step into a tricky topic every now and again, this is a place where we can engage in conversation, a place where we can come to the table, and a place where something that begins as a chasm might just become a bridgeable gap.

I’m starting to disguise my blog post titles because I know you’re all thinking, “Wilderness schmilderness” right about now, with all my posts about thrashing my way through this period of uncertainty and the unknown. But I’m a big advocate of the, “Write what you know, write where you are,” philosophy, so I’m going to keep writing about the wilderness until…well, until I’m out of the wilderness.

Honestly, I wasn’t going to post at all today because I didn’t think I had anything to say. Since I’m all Relaxed Blogger Woman now, I was feeling okay about the no-post Friday.

But. As I was doing some research for a soon-to-be-mentioned project (f.y.i. not a book deal…cue depressing music) yesterday, I came across some Bible greatness I simply had to share.

I’d just Googled “Bible verse about God and plans.”

[By the way, this is how I roll with Bible study. I don’t use a fancy concordance, and I don’t know my Bible nearly well enough to pull verses out of my elbow. So I type in phrases like, “the thing Jesus said to the blind man,” and “what was the bird that the Israelites ate in the wilderness?” and up pop a bunch of links that are usually spot-on. Google is my concordance, and it works out rather well.]

Anyway, I vaguely remembered a verse from Jeremiah about plans, and I found the one I was looking for, but what I didn’t expect was the gold mine of wilderness-related treasure that precedes that verse [there’s a lesson here, I think: Always. Read. The. Context].

Turns out, Jeremiah wrote a letter to the Israelites, who were spending seventy years (insert quick prayer here: Lord, please don’t give me a 70-year wilderness) as exiles in Babylon. And this is what God told his exiled people, via Jeremiah:

“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you in exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” (Jeremiah 29:5-7)

Now, there are two ways you can interpret these verses. There’s the Negative Nelly approach, which goes like this: For the love of the land and the sea and the sky above, I’m going to be in the wilderness for so long God’s telling me to settle down and find wives for my sons so I can have grandkids here? Lord have mercy, no!

Or, there’s the Glass Half Full approach: Well, clearly I’m going to be in the wilderness a while, so I might as well quit whining and at least build me some houses and plant me some gardens and do something useful with my time while I’m waiting for God to do his new thing.

Friends, I’m going out on a limb here. I’m going with the Glass Half Full approach on this one.

You can pick yourself up off the floor now.

Seriously though, I’m trusting that God won’t have me in this place of uncertainty for seventy years. But for however long he has me here, I’m going to be productive and accomplish what’s within my control. I’m going to build some houses and plant some gardens and eat the leafy, luscious, organic produce that’s available right here, right now, smack in the middle of the wilderness.

Because this is what I am learning: the wilderness can be a wildly productive place…if we let it.

Here’s the hard truth: We will all, every last one of us, face unpleasant, challenging, distressing, downright depressing situations in our lives. No one gets through this life unscathed. No one walks through heaven’s gates without having stared suffering in the face and without the scars and bruises to show for it. No one escapes the wilderness.

But life cannot grind to a halt during times of disappointment and duress. We cannot up and quit. We must press on. We must build our houses, plant our gardens and eat what they produce. Because here’s the other lovely truth that goes hand-in-hand with the hard truth:

The garden will produce, even in the midst of the wilderness.

God will provide, even in the midst of the wilderness.

God made a gracious promise to his people exiled in Babylon, and it’s the same promise he makes to you and me, wherever we may be exiled today:

“I will come for you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place,” God said. “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:10-11)

God will come for you and me.

He will not leave us or forsake us, ever.

He will prosper us, not harm us.

He will give us a hope and a future.

God provides in the wilderness, when we can’t see for the trees and the brush and the darkness. God provides when we step out of the wilderness, into the wide-open space of a hope and a future.

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Living out faith in the everyday is no joke. If you’re anything like me, some days you feel full of confidence and hope, eager to proclaim God’s goodness and love to the world. Other days…not so much.

Let me say straight up: I wrestle with my faith. Most days I feel a little bit like Jacob, wrangling his blessing out of God. And most days I’m okay with that. I believe God made me a questioner and a wrestler for a reason, and I believe one of those reasons is so that I can connect more authentically with others.